STUDENTS’ READING STRATEGIES TO ANSWER
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS OF READING PASSAGE
AT THE THIRD GRADE OF SMA NEGERI 1 KLEGO,
BOYOLALI 2009/2010 ACADEMIC YEAR
RESEARCH PAPER
Submitted as a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement
for Getting Bachelor Degree of Education
in English Department
WAHYU WIDATI A 320 060 077
SCHOOL OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION
MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF SURAKARTA
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
There are four skills that should be mastered by the students in
studying English, namely: listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Among
those skills, reading is considered as the important skill, which the students
should master well.
Of those four language skills, reading plays an important role in
language learning, so the students should master the reading skill in order to
answer the questions appropriately and efficiently. In this case teachers have
to help students change their inefficient reading habits (reading word by word,
focusing too much attention on form, and relying heavily on dictionary), by
teaching them efficient reading skills. A guided reading is an effective way to
do this; in this way the students can learn how to read in different purposes
(Fauziati, 2005: 138).
In academic field reading skill can’t be separated from the evaluation.
Students should have mastery on reading skill because good achievement in
reading is important to the students, so to answer the questions of reading
passage students need to use appropriate reading strategies in order to produce
good reading ability so that they can answer the questions correctly and
quickly. Multiple choice questions are the kind of question that should be
reading passage. They ask the students to select the best answer to question
about the information given in reading passage. A multiple choice question
may ask about the main ideas, direct answered details, indirect answered
details, vocabulary, or overall review ideas.
Multiple choice questions are the kinds of questions that usually follow
reading passage for the third grade as the final examination and it is
wondering why most of students spend so much time for answering these
types of questions so they fail in English final examination. Multiple choice
questions are put after each reading passage for several reasons. First, passage
with multiple choice questions appear on third grade standardized reading
tests, and students complete a lot of practice in this year. Second, multiple
choice questions are easy for teachers to grade and provide very quantitative
answers.
In reading passage students must read a great variety of materials in
various content areas, so they should learn to adjust his reading behaviour to
the material and to the objectives they have for reading it. Students’ score is
determined by their correct responses, lack of errors, and rate of reading. In
actual practice teachers gain comfort from the use of test because they are
convinced that testing programs have educational value.
There are many students of SMA N 1 KLEGO who failed in final
examination especially in English subject, because they fail in answering
in using reading strategies that are appropriate for their own purposes. Based
on the reason, the writer is interested in having study on the students’ reading
strategies to answer multiple choice questions of reading passage, and also the
writer wants to know the most appropriate strategy to answer it.
B. Problem of the Study
1. How do the students manage their strategies in answering multiple choice
questions of reading passage?
2. What are students’ difficulties in answering multiple choice questions of
reading passage?
1. to describe the way the students manage and use strategies in answering
multiple choice question of reading passage
2. to describe students’ difficulties in answering multiple choice questions of
reading passage.
3. to find the most appropriate strategies in answering multiple choice
D. Limitation of the Study
Based on the problem statement above, the writer limits the study on
the reading strategies to answer multiple choice questions of reading passage.
E. Benefit of the Study
In this research, there are two kinds of benefits, namely: theoretical and
practical benefits.
1. Theoretically, the result of this research can be used to improve the quality
on teaching-learning reading.
2. Practical benefits are as follows.
a. The result will help the teachers in increasing the students’ reading
comprehension.
b. The result will help the students in using reading strategies that are
appropriate for their own purposes.
c. The result will help the students in selecting reading strategies to be
most effective for discovering, understanding, and relating the
information, so they can interpret the major concepts of reading
passage.
d. The result can help the students to find the best strategies to answer
F. Research Paper Organization
This research consists of five chapters. Chapter I is introduction, which
consists of background, problem statement, and objective of the study.
Chapter II comprises the previous study, underlying theory, which explains
the notion of reading, the notion of multiple choice questions, general kinds of
reading skills, and general strategies for reading questions. Chapter III is
Research Method. Chapter IV consists of Analyzing and Discussion. The last,
